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Jacques Villeret (February 6, 1951 – January 28, 2005) was a French actor. Born Jacky Boufroura in Loches, Indre-et-Loire, France, of Algerian origin, he is most famous for his role as François Pignon in Le Dîner de cons, both on the stage and in the later film. Other celebrated roles include the extra terrestrial in La soupe aux choux, the autistic Mo in L`Été en pente douce, and marshal Ludwig von Apfelstrudel in Papy fait de la résistance. He married Irina Tarassov, an actress and writer, on December 26 1979. They separated in 1998. (Irina has written about their life together in her book, Un jour, tout ira bien.)[1] Having met Seny, an African widow, Jacques and she were about to start life together in Paris when he died, in Evreux, following a liver hemorrhage.

The son of a college bursar and a hairdresser, he studied at the Conservatoire de Paris (CNSAD) in the class of Louis Seigner, the grandfather of Emmanuelle Seigner and Mathilde Seigner. At the time of making the film Un aller simple directed by Laurent Heynemann - a film about integration and racism and the clash of generations - he said that watching the young actors in the film, Barbara Schulz and Lorant Deutsch, reminded him of the insouciance he had had as a young man with his friends at the Conservatoire. When his career was at its height, with the success of Le Dîner de cons, a cruel separation and an enormous financial turnaround to do with tax, plunged him into depression. Alcohol, which helped to erase day to day problems for a while, and to combat a certain timidity, became a problem which he sought to resolve by isolating himself and hiding away for periods. Alcohol is a friend, but a friend who means you harm. His love of his profession, despite , or perhaps because of, its great demands, brought him back from the brink. In an interview in 2001 he spoke of his admiration for performers like Johnny Hallyday and Jacques Brel, who committed totally, and quoted the author Louis-Ferdinand Céline: When I write, I put my balls on the table.